I push away my coffee cup, stand up and go out the way I came in and stand to the right of the entrance smoking a cigarette just beside a huge concrete ashtray. I am not alone. A man in a wheelchair beside me nervously sucks his cigarette. He looks worn out. I don’t want to think about what is wrong
with him. Behind him a nurse in green stands gazing into the air at nothing.
I look over at the helicopter still standing quietly on its pad with its rotor blades hanging, being nothing now but several tons of dead metal, and I look at the car park where my car stands among hundreds of others. It has got a small dent in the back bumper and a nasty scrape along the front left wing. Maybe I can
get one second-hand. Maybe I should look for a job. I have hardly any money left. I don’t know. Above all, I must sleep, and then I must think of something.
I finish my cigarette, bend down and stub it out in the big ashtray which is full to the top and would make almost anyone stop smoking. I feel a slight pain in my side when I straighten up. Automatically, I lift my hand and press it against
the bottom rib and what I fear is something new and unknown a little further in. The nurse turns and looks at me, and even though his face is quite expressionless I suspect a certain irony and think: he knows something I do not know, and I let my hand
fall
. I avoid his eyes and look past him at the emergency entrance a bit further on where an ambulance approaches, turns and stops with its back
to the entrance. The driver gets out and walks round the vehicle to open the back doors, and two nurses come out of the hospital; a man and a woman. He is tall and strong, she has rather severe-looking glasses. They pull the stretcher from the ambulance and snap down the wheels, straighten some tubes hanging from a pole, I can see blood all the way from where I stand, and for just a second
she
looks over at me and stiffens. It is Mrs Grinde in a green nurse’s uniform. And then she looks at her watch. I don’t know why, but she glances down at her watch and looks over at me again, and then I do the same thing. I look at my watch. It is half past four. That tells me nothing except the time of day. When I look up again they are on their way in with the stretcher between them. I walk quickly
over there, past the ambulance and over to the glass doors and stop outside, and stay there staring in. I am not allowed to go in there, but I see Mrs Grinde’s back by the stretcher moving at full speed and the tall man on the other side. Someone comes running and puts something into her hand. I can’t see what it is, but they do not stop, she just half turns and takes it as they hurry on. Her body
is indecipherable in the shapeless green uniform and might look like anything at all, but it does not, she has a quite specific shape, a quite specific curving and extension and warmth, and if I have
not
thought about her once today that I can recall now, I can
feel
her all the same, as a half-blind animal does underground when it turns in deep darkness beside another, and nothing but that movement
is important, and then the next, until skin and skin become one skin; no glasses, because no-one need see anything anyway, no green uniform or brothers with tubes down their throats or roaring helicopters or Zen Buddhist manoeuvres on cold nights.
But why did she look at her watch?
I go back to the main entrance and walk in, cross the wide hall past the Narvesen kiosk and cafeteria tables on
the left where my coffee cup waits on one of them half full and abandoned, and right over to the lifts. I press the bell and wait. There is a ping and when the doors open I cross the line.
I leave the lift and walk down the corridor to the intensive care room and push the door open. A little too hard, maybe, I didn’t mean to. The man in the bed there is quite unknown to me. He is not my brother,
anyway. He is wounded in the face and his head is bandaged, as are several places on his body, and there is plaster on both legs and a collar round his neck. His head is clamped in a kind of steel device screwed together on both sides, and only his eyes move. They grow big and frightened and stare at me as I burst in. I stop in the middle of the floor and the door shuts behind me with far too
loud a sound, and I say:
“I’m sorry, I took the wrong door. I will go again. Oh, shit.” This last is to myself mostly, and I back towards the door. He moves his lips. He wants to say something. I stop and go back to the bed and bend over him. His breath is faint on my face.
“What?” I say.
“Please,” he whispers. His eyes fill with tears, they run over in a rush and roll down his face that gets
soaking wet, wounds and all, I have never seen such a flood, and he whispers: “Please, please.”
“But for God’s sake, I am not going to hurt you,” I say, whispering too. I feel I’m getting really annoyed, this situation is meaningless. I straighten up and walk over to the door again.
“I will fetch someone,” I say over my shoulder on the way out.
I stand in the corridor with my back to the wall.
It’s as if I had been running. I am breathless. And then I go to the nurses’ office. I knock on the door frame and put my head through the open door. It is the same nurse as last night.
“Hi,” I say.
She turns and recognises me. Reports or notes or whatever they are called are on the desk, and to the right is the jug of cocoa. That much cocoa can’t be good for you. She puts her pen down.
“Your
brother has been moved to the next floor down,” she says. “He is conscious now. How are you
doing
? Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
“Couldn’t have been better. I slept like a baby. But the man in intensive care doesn’t feel so good.”
“We know. That is why he is there.”
“I think he wants to talk to someone.”
“He mustn’t talk. He must have complete rest. It is important.”
“OK,” I say, “that’s
settled, then. You’re the boss. I had better slip down a floor then.”
“Yes, you do that.”
She turns to the desk and her journals again and picks up her pen. I should have said something about stability, I guess, but nothing comes to mind.
I do not use the lift, but take the stairs down the one floor and go from the landing in through the glass doors to the ward. His bed is in the corridor.
It is too sudden, I have no time to prepare myself, there is nowhere to hide and I cannot turn because he is not lying down, he is sitting up in bed waving his arms and laughing. His wife Randi is sitting on a chair by the bed. She catches sight of me and waves. I have not seen him this lively for ages. I walk up to them slowly, breathing as deeply as I can and letting the air slowly out, and I fetch
a chair and sit down beside Randi. She looks at me, shrugs slightly, and does not seem to be having any fun at all.
“There you are at last,” he says, “come to visit your brother. So now there is no-one else, is there? Now we are a plenary session.” He laughs loudly.
“I was here last night,” I say.
“You were?”
“Yes.”
He falls silent, he leans against the wall and smiles, but he is not smiling
at me or at anyone else that I can see, and then he laughs again and says: “I was just telling Randi about the time you and I went up to Aluns Lake to fish in the drinking water even though it was strictly forbidden, and we met the tramp who had moved into the forest to avoid all the shops that sold beer and all the wine monopolies so he couldn’t get drunk, and now in the evenings he just sat
looking at the lake, scouting for beavers, and lived on canned food, and how he helped us reel in the big pike we took home with us later and did not dare show anyone because we had broken the law, and then we put it in the basement store, and there it lay until it went completely rotten and started to stink like hell.”
He takes a breath and goes on, and the thing is that nothing he says is true.
It is something I once wrote in a novel mixed up with a story by Raymond Carver I know he has read, because I asked him to and we talked about it afterwards. It is only a year or two ago.
“Do you remember the smell of him?” my brother says. “Of bonfire and pine needles and marshes, and how we loved that smell, and how we wanted to live a life like his, but we were too young, weren’t we, and we
had to go to school, and how that made us furious.” He
smiles
, what he says is just crap, and I cannot understand why he talks like this, for we never have shared such an experience, never shared those words, but
I
can clearly remember thinking like this when I was a teenager and have often done so since, and I never heard my brother say he had the same ideas. It was
my
secret, all that, and no-one
knew a thing about it until I started to write about it many years later.
Randi bites her lip and looks at me to find out what to think about this stream of words, but I cannot help her and in fact do not want to, and then she steals a glance at her watch and says: “David has already been at home on his own for two hours, I’d better be going.”
David is their son, he is the same age as my older
daughter, barring three days. When my brother hears his name he blinks several times and his face goes stiff. Randi does not see that, she bends down and gives him a quick hug. Then she stands up, and he is just as stiff.
“Take care,” she says, “see you tomorrow,” and walks down the corridor to the glass doors, and she is a stylish lady seen from behind, with brisk, determined steps on her way
away from this place and maybe much further, maybe to a whole new life, and I stay on alone beside the bed with the vacant chair at my side. My brother stares at that chair.
“I am so tired,” he says, not raising his eyes. He lies down and pulls the duvet up to his chin, closes his eyes and opens them again and looks up at the ceiling, and
I
think of how I would like to know what he sees up there,
and then I realise that it is not true. It is just something people say when they do not know what else to say.
People are walking along the corridor behind me, it is visiting time for others as well, and they laugh and talk loudly, and I turn and see they are correctly dressed in newly pressed civilian clothes, bringing flowers and chocolates, and even lousy novels in paperback editions under
their arms. I stay twisted round in my chair staring after them, and I do not want to turn back. I have nothing to say. And then I say:
“So you thought you could just go off and leave me on my own, did you?”
The chocolates people are talking at the end of the corridor. Someone opens a door to another room and closes it again. There is someone crying in that room. Otherwise all is quiet. Maybe
my brother has gone to sleep. I hope so. I look at him.
“You won’t do,” he says. His voice is completely empty, there is nothing there for me.
“OK,” I say.
“I want to sleep,” he says, turning his face to the wall.
“That’s OK.”
I sit on the chair looking at his back and the back of his head with the curly hair growing thinner. He has a bald patch now. I do not recall seeing that before.
“OK. So long,” I say.
“So long,” he says to the wall.
I get up and go. At the end of the corridor I stop and look back. A nurse comes along pushing a screen which she arranges in front of his bed.
I do not wait for the lift, but make for the stairs, and there are many floors, six or seven, or maybe eight, I seem to lose count, and I more or less run the whole way down, and it’s like sinking,
and there is hardly anyone on those stairs. Only once there are two men coming slowly up, side by side, step by step, and they talk and look at each other, and I do not want to go round them, to change direction, it is too much trouble, so I aim right between them. There is really not enough room, so I snarl:
“Out of the fucking way,” and push the one to the left in the shoulder. He curses and
I hear them stop and feel them staring at my back. But
I
do not stop.
On the ground floor, I stop running, but I still walk quickly, I can out-walk most people if I decide to, and through the big hall I slacken speed so much it almost looks normal. It is crowded with people and all the tables are taken. That is all right by me. I am on my way out.
It is raining in front of the hospital. The
helicopter has gone. I run again, across the tarmac in the rain to the car park, and suddenly I forget where I left my car.
I
run up and down the rows. There are many more than when I arrived, several rows of brand new cars. How people can afford such new cars is more than I can grasp, fuck it all, I shout, fuck it all, where the fuck is my old car, and the rain pours down as if possessed, and
it cannot go on like this. I can’t take it any more. I must get away, I must go somewhere new, see completely different things than this misery here, see some other country with different people. And then there it is, my white Mazda with a handsome scrape on the left front wing. I unlock the door and get in, hair and shoulders sopping wet, and picture sea voyages when boats were boats and not floating
casinos, and they rolled with the waves as they were meant to do, with wind sweeping the decks, and all the places I would dream about were far, far away.
10
I WAS NINETEEN
and came down to Gothenburg late at night from off the Europa road, and it was late September and the sky was dark above the big town. The lorry driver had shown me which way I should go and which sign to look for to get out along the lighted streets to the harbour area at the other end and further on all the way to where the boat for England was moored, and it was a long stretch,
he said, and it certainly would be dark there and quite deserted, but I liked the walking, I had plenty of time, my boat did not leave until next morning. I had taken no chances and would not miss it. Now I had a night before me.
I had been up at dawn that morning to avoid disturbing my parents, and everything went well and quietly until I had to go into the living room to fetch something I had
forgotten, and then my youngest brother sat on the stairs. He was seven years old and had very shiny, almost white hair, and he sat there in his pyjamas full of warm sleep, looking at me and waiting, and saying nothing. I really did not know him very well, I was twelve when he was born and had bought my first record player, and after that my eyes
were
looking in quite other directions than to
the living room at home, but he was a good lad, and we were always very polite to each other. Now I went up and sat down on the same step.